True story: A few weeks ago I was showing two teenage girls some
origami. They knew how to fold the famous crane. When the
Japanese want something really special they fold 1000 cranes. I
started of fold what looked like a crane, but with a few different
folds at the end I made something very different and held it up.

"What's that?" they asked. It is a slightly unhappy experience
when you fold a figure and people cannot recognize what it is.

"It's a Starship Enterprise."

"What's that?"

"It is a Starship Enterprise, like from 'Star Trek'."

"I never watched any 'Star Trek's. 'Star Wars' is more popular."

I said, "I thought even 'Star Wars' was not that popular any
more. It is THE MATRIX that is popular."

There is a popular cartoon that shows two fish swimming, not in a
tank, but in a blender. One fish is telling the other, "I can't
stand the tension." It is a scary thought that with one quick
button press you might go from being a healthy--if anxiety-
ridden--fish to being gefilte fish. It is a common human angst
that things can be going just fine for you one moment and then a
moment later you have had a huge reversal of fortune and you are
in big trouble. And those who are in big trouble are perhaps the
lucky ones. Something can happen unexpectedly and you can be
snuffed out in a matter of seconds or perhaps days. That is what
the story of Oedipus all about. This guy is on top of the world.
He is King. Then he finds out that the man he killed a while
back was his father. That cute lady he married is his mother.
Hours later he has lost it all and is plucking out his eyes. The
theme shows up a lot in the great literature. One minute you
have invented a Nobel-Prize-worthy matter transmitter that will
revolutionize the world, the next you have an insect body and
want to go out and find a nice dog pile. It is very dramatic.
These Swords of Damocles hanging over people's heads fascinate
us. Of course, the story of Damocles is another such story.
Damocles envied his king so to teach Damocles a lesson he was
given a royal banquet. In the middle of the meal he looked up
and saw a sword suspended over his head. A single hair that could
have broken at any second held it up. He got so caught up in
physics questions about the mass of the sword and tensile strength
of a human hair that he clean forgot that one of the powers of the
king is simply to move his seat at the dinner table.

But in some senses we all have a Sword of Damocles. During the
Cold War the Sword of Damocles was replaced by a certain button
that would send guided missiles chock full of nuclear greetings
from a certain unnamed country to the United States. That
missile could fall at any second. And that sort of fear is still
with some of us. I live just a very short distance (as the crow
flies) from terrorist target Manhattan. This is a constant
threat. And the probability is a little alarming that a large
asteroid or meteorite could fall from the sky as others have in
the past. We all are figuratively looking down the barrel of a
gun. But in fact we are also looking literally down the barrel
of a sort of loaded gun. Do you know about WR104? No, it is not
a rock station. WR104 actually is a gun pointed you. Worse yet,
it is also pointed at me. It is pointed at all of us. But don't
look around the room for this gun. You cannot see it with the
naked eye. Only astronomers can see it. It is 8000 light years
away. Or at least it was 8000 years ago. Who knows if it even
exists right now? And if it does not exist any more, that could
be even worse.

Okay, enough hysteria, it is time for me to start making some
sense. What am I talking about? WR104 is an unstable star in
the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. And, yes, it is
8000 light years away. Why do you care? Well it might explode.
Why do you care about that? Well, by the sheerest of
coincidences our solar system just happens to be on the extension
of the axis of spin of WR104. Why do you care about that?
Because when an unstable star like this explodes it sends out an
intense focussed beam of gamma radiation right along its axis of
spin and in this case right at planet earth. OK, maybe you are
starting to care. Let me set your mind at ease. If it exploded
today it would take, of course, 8000 years for that gamma
radiation beam to hit Mother Earth. That is the good news. Here
is the bad news. We are seeing it as it was 8000 years ago and
then it was ready to pop. And for all we know it did. Your
surprise package of gamma radiation may already be in the mail.
For something that is that far away, what are the chances that it
would be aimed right at us? Well, they are not big. But
according to astronomer Peter Tuthill at University of Sydney,
Australia, it looks a lot like we are looking down "the barrel of
the gun."

So what can we do? Well, we can sit here on Earth like craven
cowards quaking in our boots afraid it might explode or we can go
to WR104 and re-aim it in another direction. Given our current
state of technological advancement I suggest we sit here on Earth
like craven cowards quaking in our boots afraid it might explode.

How serious is this fear? Well, even if the star appears to be
aimed precisely at us there is still a lot of error in that
observation. If it did go off and it missed us by just a couple
AUs it would pass by unnoticed. (An AU is 500 light-seconds. It
is by definition the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun.)
So we may be isolated from the beam in spatial distance. More to
the point we are likely to be isolated from the killer beam in
time. Being ready to explode can mean that it will explode just
a few hundred millennia in the future. I do not know if this
helps you or not, but even if this nasty thing does come to pass
while you are on Earth you will probably never know anything is
happening. Any sign that the explosion has happened will travel
to Earth at the same speed as the radiation itself does. You
will get no notice. Will anyone survive? It is possible. If by
the time it goes off we are a space-faring civilization that can
survive without the solar system, yes, of course then life will
go on. Humanity would continue. If we are not that far advanced
at the time your best hope is probably something that I believe is
called "The Rapture."

All kidding aside, this is not a great fear, unless somebody
wants to make it one. But it is perfectly real and as far as I
can tell I have represented it accurately.

The second novel that I read on my Alaskan vacation was SUNSTORM
by Clarke and Baxter. It's the second book in the "A Time
Odyssey" trilogy, and in my opinion it is vastly superior to its
predecessor, TIME's EYE. I felt that the first book was a dud,
and I was hoping that this one would be better--and it was.

Bisesa Dutt has returned to her regular time and place from Mir,
the patchwork world put together by the Firstborn and watched by
the Eyes. In fact, she has returned a day after she was
abducted, and just in time for a monstrous burst of solar
activity that disrupts all electronic life on earth. In the time
of the book, *everything* has a computer chip or is run by some
electronics or other, so when the sun does its little number it
disrupts all life on the planet.

Cut to the moon. Mikhail Martynov lives on the moon and works at
the Space Weather Service Station. Mikhail receives a visit
from one Doctor Eugene Mangles, the one fellow who predicted
precisely when that solar event would happen. It appears that
Mangles has discovered that there is another nasty solar event
coming, but this one will be much worse: it's going to wipe out
all life on earth.

People need to be convinced of that, of course. That's where
Siobhan McGorran, the Astronomer Royal, comes in, as well as
various other political and scientific folks. And then there's
that Bisesa Dutt person, begging for an audience with McGorran to
tell her that the event that is leading up to this catastrophic
solar activity occurred thousands of years ago, and was done
deliberately by an alien race that is trying to wipe out
humanity. Even though most folks are wary of Dutt's story of
alien abduction, McGorran takes a chance that Dutt may be telling
the truth, and passes the information along to Mangles to see
where it will take his investigation.

What to do? Why, build a giant shield/umbrella in space to
protect the earth from as much of the harmful stuff as possible
and hope that humanity survives the rest. Yeah, it's a bit of a
stretch, but that's not the point here.

This story worked for me on a couple of levels. The first is
that, unlike the first book, *something actually happens*. I've
said that some of the best science fiction is about how
technology and events affect mankind, or tells the story of how
mankind deals with technology and events. This book revels in
showing how humankind, basically down and out, can work together
when things get tough, and if most of humanity working together
to build a giant shield in space isn't it, I don't know what is.
The second is that there is a lot of science here, and I tend to
like that in my science fiction. There is a drawback though, in
that if you don't like a lot of info-dumping you won't be happy
with SUNSTORM. Sure, early SF was written with the idea of
teaching in mind, but folks aren't expecting that these days, I
don't think. You get it here in abundance.

So, the real questions are who are the Firstborn and why do they
want to wipe out humanity? I suspect those questions will be
answered in the final book of the trilogy. I'm looking forward
to it. [-jak]

THE LAST WINTER
2006 brought one of the better efforts from maverick horror film
maker Larry Fessenden. It is not special-effects heavy. The film
shows an Arctic drilling crew led by Ron Perlman having some odd
and unprecedented problems. It seems this year it is just not
getting cold, so the roads are slushy rather than icy, a big
inconvenience. But something else is desperately wrong. The
warming is causing something very bad to happen under the
permafrost, though nobody is quite sure of the nature of the
evil. People are dying, and those left alive have an
inexplicable sense of doom. Fessenden seems to set many of his
stories in the cold North. He is good at creating an eerie,
chilly mood. This film reminds me a lot of John Carpenter's THE
THING, but without the explicit scenes of a monster. Fessenden
tends more to Val Lewton's approach of showing very little of the
real horror and letting the viewer's imagination run wild. This
is a very strange, mysterious film. Rating: high +1 or 6/10

THE FALLEN IDOL
This 1948 drama is one more fine film from Carol Reed, the man
who directed THE THIRD MAN, ODD MAN OUT, and a personal favorite
of mine, the almost impossible to find OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS. A
young boy idolizes his family's butler (played by Ralph
Richardson). As pleasant as the butler is, that is just how
nasty his wife the head of the service staff is. When the wife
is accidentally killed the boy believes the butler is guilty of
murder, but loves him enough to try to lie for him. The story is
by Graham Greene and Reed is his very best screen interpreter.
The photography is excellent sharp monochrome with very black
blacks and very white whites, in start contrast to the writing.
I liked the film so much I watched again THE THIRD MAN, Reed's
best known class. Two Greene/Reeds in one day makes for a very
good day. Rating: low +3 or 8/10

LOST HORIZON (1937)
This is the classic film adaptation of James Hilton's novel of
Westerners kidnapped and taken to a lamasery where people live in
peace and contentment. They discover that living placidly
give them a life-span of hundreds of years. Slowly their Western
attitudes are conquered by the sheer joy of being in this
paradise. I know people who are greatly inspired by this film of
Shangri-La, where high in the Himalayas everybody lives in peace
and harmony, free from want. In fact, of course, Hilton cheats.
He assumes that in Shangri La there is no illness. There is also
a large gold deposit also takes care of everybody's desires.
Fans of this story tend to forget that Shangri-La runs on
plentiful gold and magical healing. It also is predicated on the
assumption that there is no crime where there is no need. Would
that it was true. But the happy paradise is attractive to the
film's fans and it is a powerful image. This is considered one
of Frank Capra's finest films. Rating: low +3 or 8/10

THE NAKED SPUR
Made the same year as SHANE, THE NAKED SPUR outshone it in the
box-office. Aside from the acting power the budget was not very
high. It does have some nice high country nature photography,
filmed in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Under Anthony Mann's
direction it was one of the first films in which Jimmy Stewart
got beyond his aw-shucks, country boy image and was shown as a
driven and disturbed man. In this film he is full of rage and
suspicion. The plot is sort of a portable TREASURE OF THE SIERRA
MADRE crossed with 3:10 TO YUMA. Stewart is a bounty hunter
looking for a former acquaintance with a big reward on his head.
Along the way he picks up a gold-hungry old prospector and a
disreputable ex-soldier (Ralph Meeker). They get their wanted
man (Robert Ryan) and the young woman who is traveling with him
(Janet Leigh wanted a role where she had to do more than just
pretty up a set). The three bounty hunters have to get their
prisoner back to civilization to claim the reward. Ryan is
clever enough to play his three captors off against each other.
Three men want the reward split as few ways as possible. One man
wants to kill his three captors. One woman is deciding what she
wants. This is a good story and the scenery is a plus. Rating:
low +2 or 7/10

THE BARON OF ARIZONA
This is a 1950 film by Samuel Fuller. Fuller worked outside the
studio system and was what we would call today an independent
filmmaker. Many of his films had a sort of amateurish or
unpolished appearance. Perhaps they have the feel of the short
film that the studios assigned to their new directors to give
them practice. Nevertheless, Fuller frequently took on themes
that were taboo at the time. Here Fuller tells the story of
real-life James Addison Reavis (1843-1914) and one of the
greatest frauds in American History. Reavis used forged papers
in an intricate plan to falsely justify his purported claim to
virtually all of the land in Arizona. Supposedly it was his
inheritance from a land grant by the King of Spain. Spanish
deeds had to be honored by the United States government under the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The government could not prove his
claim was a fraud. With a plan perhaps more elaborate than
cinematically intriguing, Reavis creates and plants forged
evidence to make his claim. The story is not polished, but will
appeal to fans of THE HOAX and CATCH ME IF YOU CAN. In spite of
some awkwardness and the mostly static telling the story is
basically good. Rating: low +2 or 7/10 [-mrl]

Khalid Hosseini was born in Afghanistan and today lives in
California as a physician and now a novelist. In fact, THE KITE
RUNNER (ISBN-13 978-1-594-48000-3, ISBN-10 1-594-48000-1) is his
first novel, it was adapted into a popular film, and he has now
written a second novel, A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS which itself is
in the early stages of production as a film.

THE KITE RUNNER begins as the story of the relationship of two
boys. Amir is a boy of Kabul whose father, a wealthy merchant,
owns a nice mansion with servants. Hassan is the son of Amir's
servant. The two boys are inseparable. They seem apart only
when Amir goes to school and Hassan returns home to for the
household chores of a servant.

For sport Amir flies kites competitively and is becoming very
good at the sport, attracting local attention. His servant
Hassan is his kite runner. That means Hassan chases after the
rival kites that Amir has decapitated. Hassan dotes on Amir,
which bother Amir a little. Amir also tells stories that enchant
Hassan. Together they face the local bullies who terrify them
both.

The day of a great kite competition comes and Amir has a great
victory. Hassan runs to get the loser's lost kite. Eventually
Amir runs after Hassan and sees him being confronted by the
bullies. Amir watches on as his friend is raped. He wants to
defend his friend and knows he should, but is terrorized and
instead sulks off.

After that nothing is the same between the boys. Amir comes to
hate himself for his cowardice and disloyalty. Hassan does not
admit to knowing of his friend's betrayal of him, but he almost
certainly does. Amir turns his shame into rejection of Hassan.

This is all just the set-up of the story. We will follow Amir
through tumultuous years of history for Afghanistan and his
father's and his own perilous escape to the United States. His
shame at the one action will bring him back to a Kabul under the
Taliban in an effort to redeem his life and to recover his self-
respect.

There are some minor faults to the book. The character of Hassan
is just a little too perfect and it adds a melodramatic feel to
the book. Amir did so much worse than betray a friend, he
betrayed the wonderful, loyal, faithful Hassan. He denied, if
you will, a Christ-figure. This weakens the story. If Hassan
had not been so perfect would the betrayal be any more
forgivable? Do we need to be just only to the faultless?

Much of the thrust of the book is the contrast of life in Kabul
before and after the coming of the Soviet invasion and later of
Taliban. The old Kabul under the monarchy is a place of
contentment (at least for the wealthy Amir and his family) whose
similarities to the West are more apparent than the differences.
Kabul under the heel of the Taliban is a place of constant fear,
of public executions, of corruption, and of systematized child
rape under the guise of religious orthodoxy. It is the place
that Amir must go to redeem himself and his self-respect.

As bad as the Taliban is for the men in THE KITE RUNNER, it is
far worse for women as we see in the haunting A THOUSAND SPLENDID
SUNS. These are purported to be the first novels written in
English by an Afghan. If so they are an enthralling start.

I read in sequence THREE CUPS OF TEA (by Greg Mortenson and David
Oliver Relin), THE KITE-RUNNER, and A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS.
The three make a very good combination. The Mortenson book is
non-fiction and tells of his efforts building schools in Pakistan
and Afghanistan. At least to Mortenson this work is a powerful
weapon against the Taliban and other Islamic extremists. His
schools give education to the young and with education they can
resist the extremists. His book also describes what a virulent
evil the Taliban has been for Afghanistan. It also sees that
part of the world through the eyes of an American. This has a
downside and an upside. The downside is that Mortenson cannot
understand the area as thoroughly as someone who was born and
raised there. The upside is that he knows how an American would
see that part of the world. To Mortenson the area is very alien
to his and our expectations. On the other hand in Hosseini's
writing Kabul sounds not too unlike the town I grew up in. Each
book in the succession expresses more rage and frustration at
what the Taliban did to Afghanistan. Together they make a strong
case for anything anyone can do to defeat this terrible movement.

WHO? by Algis Budrys (ISBN-13 978-1-587-76010-5, ISBN-10
1-587-76010-X) was one of the books chosen for discussion by the
Worldcon this year. I have read this before, but decided to re-
read it.

It has a New Jersey connection: Lucas Martino comes from Milano,
NJ, which is supposedly near Bridgetown (also spelled Bridgeton).
Milano doesn't exist, but Bridgeton does, and at the location
described. And because it was written in 1958 and set in the
1960s, the book has some anomalies. Martino goes to "Mass Tech"
(also called MIT). More seriously, there is no Vietnam War, and
the result is a very "alternate history" feel to it.

The premise is that an American scientist has been injured in an
industrial/experiment accident near the Russian border, and has
been repaired by the Soviets (who were closer than the Western
doctors), but now has a metal head and one metal arm. The
question facing the United States government is whether the man
returned to them is Lucas, or whether he has been replaced. One
problem with the book is that no one seems to take into account
the possibility that the man is Martino, but that he has been
brainwashed. Budrys eliminates fingerprints by saying that if
they could attach a metal arm to a man, they could attach another
man's arm instead. I'm not sure this is true, but even so,
wouldn't Martino's footprint as a baby be on file? (Maybe not--
it's possible that this is a more recent procedure.)

The real problem is that it seems as though Budrys has
pre-determined that it will be impossible to tell whether the man
is Martino or not. Any possibility they come up with, they also
come up with a reason why it won't work. Admittedly, the metal
head rules out dental matches, but what about identifying marks
or scars? Nope, he doesn't have any. Memories? He could have
done research. And of course this was written before DNA
analysis. In fact, what Budrys has given us is an example of
non-falsifiability.

Continuing through the books selected for Worldcon discussion, I
also started THE LANGUAGES OF PAO by Jack Vance (no ISBN
available), but concluded after a few chapters that it wasn't
doing anything for me, and gave up. Other books chosen included
METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN by Robert A. Heinlein (ISBN-13
978-0-671-57780-3, ISBN-10 0-671-57780-8; with REVOLT IN 2100), A
CASE OF CONSCIENCE (ISBN-13 978-0-345-43835-5, ISBN-10
0-345-43835-3) and THE TRIUMPH OF TIME by James Blish (ISBN-13
978-1-585-67602-6, ISBN-10 1-585-67602-0; as part of CITIES IN
FLIGHT), and THE BIG TIME by Fritz Leiber (ISBN-13
978-0-312-89078-0, ISBN-10 0-312-89078-8). I did not have time
to read all of them (see next week's column for one reason), so I
skipped A CASE OF CONSCIENCE (I've read it several times already)
and THE TRIUMPH OF TIME (the last book of a tetralogy). I read
THE BIG TIME, but was not impressed. I will note that THE BIG
TIME was the Hugo winner for 1958, so not everyone agrees with
me. And I skipped METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN, which was chosen
because it was a Heinlein novel written in 1958. (All the books
chosen were written in 1958, and therefore are celebrating their
fiftieth anniversaries. At that time, there was only an
announcement of the Hugo winner, without a preliminary list of
nominees, so I have no way of knowing if these would have been
that list.) [-ecl]

Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Quote of the Week:
My Country, right or wrong" is a thing no patriot
would think of saying except in a desperate case.
It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
-- G. K. Chesterton
(1874-1936)